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Methuselah

Methuselah (Hebrew: מְתוּשֶׁלַח‬, Methushelah "Man of the dart/spear", or alternatively "his death shall bring judgment"[1]) is the man reported to have lived the longest at the age of 969 in the Hebrew Bible.[2] Methuselah was the son of Enoch, the father of Lamech, and the grandfather of Noah.

22 And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

23 And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:

24 And Enoch walked with God: and he [was] not; for God took him.

25 And Methuselah lived a hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech:

26 And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters:

27 And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.
—Genesis 5:21–27

The verses are available in three manuscript traditions, the Masoretic, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Torah. The three traditions do not agree with each other. The differences can be summarized as follows:[3]

There have been numerous attempts to account for these differences – the most obvious being accidental corruption by copyists and translators. Some errors may be the result of mistaken attempts to correct previous errors. Gerhard Larsson has suggested that those who translated the Septuagint from Hebrew to Greek in Alexandria around the 3rd century BC, aware that the Egyptian historian Manetho makes no mention of a Deluge, lengthened the patriarchs' ages to push back the time of the flood to before the first Egyptian dynasty.[4]

Methuselah appears in two important Jewish works from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. In the Book of Enoch,[6] Enoch (as the narrator) tells Methuselah of the coming worldwide flood and of the future Messianic kingdom. He is known to have a great sword (Sword of Methuselah) that conquers evils and ghosts. The Book of Jubilees names Methuselah's mother and his wife – both are named Edna – and his daughter-in-law, Betenos, Lamech's wife.

The 17th century midrashicSefer haYashar ("Book of Jasher")[7] describes Methuselah with his grandson Noah attempting to persuade the people of the earth to return to godliness.[8] All other very long-lived people died, and Methuselah was the only one of this class left.[9] God planned to bring the flood after all the men who walked in the ways of the Lord had died (besides Noah and his family).[10] Methuselah lived until the ark was built, but died before the flood, since God had promised he would not be killed with the unrighteous.[9] The Sefer haYashar gives Methuselah's age at death as 960[11] and does not synchronize his death with the flood.

The Sumerian King List mentions a character named Ubara-Tutu who seems almost identical to Methuselah. He was the son of En-men-dur-ana the Sumerian Enoch, and king of Sumer until the flood swept over the land. Although their ages are different, their father and their year of death remain the same.[12]

The meaning of Methuselah's age has engendered considerable speculation, but no widely accepted conclusions. These speculations can be discussed under four categories and their combinations: literal, mistranslation, symbolic, and fictional interpretations.

Interpretations of the Bible following biblical literalism take Methuselah's 969 years to be 969 solar years. Some literalists suggest certain arguments for how this could be: early humans had a better diet, or a water vapor canopy protected the earth from radiation before the Flood.[15] Others introduce theological causes: humans were originally to have everlasting life, but sin was introduced into the world by Adam and Eve, its influence became greater with each generation, and God progressively shortened human life, particularly after the Flood.[16] The Catholic Encyclopedia says "Certain exegetes solve the difficulty to their own satisfaction by declaring that the year meant by the sacred writer is not the equivalent of our year."[17]

Some believe that Methuselah's extreme age is the result of an ancient mistranslation that converted "months" to "years", producing a more credible 969 lunar months, or 78½ years,[18] but the same calculation applied to Enoch would have him fathering Methuselah at the age of 5[19] using numbers from the Masoretic Text. Donald V. Etz suggested that the Genesis 5 numbers "might for convenience have all been multiples of 5 or 10".[20] If the Septuagint numbers are divided by 10, Methuselah's 165 when he fathered his son would be 16.5 years, and the 969 when he died would be 96.9 years.

Ellen Bennet argued that the Septuagint Genesis 5 numbers are in tenths of years, which "will explain how it was that they read 930 years for the age of Adam instead of 93 years, and 969 years for Methuselah instead of 96 years, and 950 years for that of Noah instead of 95 years"... "Surely it is much more rational to conclude that Noah lived 50 years instead of 500 years before he took a wife and begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth." and lists the Septuagint total ages with decimal points: 93.0 for Adam, 91.0 for Cainan, 96.9 for Methuselah, 95.0 for Noah, etc.[21] Robert M. Best provided a similar table of the same Septuagint Genesis 5 numbers with decimal points inserted in the same tenth position.[22]

There is also the possibility that the ages represent not the length of life of an individual but rather the time span of a dynasty. Under this interpretation, it isn't that Methuselah lived for 969 years but rather that his clan had "dominion" for that period.[23]

Methuselah's father Enoch, who does not die but is taken by God, is the seventh patriarch, and Methuselah, the eighth, dies in the year of the Flood, which ends the ten-generational sequence from Adam to Noah, in whose time the world is destroyed.[24]

Among those who believe that all the numbers of Genesis 5, including Methuselah's age, have no meaning at all, Kenneth Kitchen calls them "pure myth",[25] Yigal Levin believes they are intended simply to speed the reader from Adam to Noah,[26] and Claus Westermann believes they are intended to create the impression of a distant past.[27]

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Methuselah's name "has become a synonym for longevity".[17] It was used in this sense in the title of Robert Heinlein's novella Methuselah's Children, about a group of people persecuted because of their longevity.

Saying that someone is "as old as Methuselah" is a humorous way of saying that someone is very elderly.[28] The word "Methuselarity," a portmanteau of Methuselah and singularity, was coined by Aubrey de Grey to mean a future point in time when all of the medical conditions that cause human death would be eliminated, and death would occur only by accident or homicide.[29]

In the novel Altered Carbon, which has been adapted into a TV series of the same name, a class of people are known as Meths, in reference to Methuselah, as they can afford to live forever by transferring their consciousness into cloned bodies.

^Borland, James A. (1990). "Did People Live to be Hundreds of Years Old Before the Flood?". The Genesis Debate. Grand Rapids, MI. p. 174.

^Abraham Malamat, "King Lists of the Old Babylonian Period and Biblical Genealogies," Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 165. See also the discussion of "ten" in the Gen. genealogies in M. Abot section 5, Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 685. Duane A. Garrett also thinks this is deliberate, thus indicating redaction, Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Bible, Ross-shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2000, p. 99.